Herding Cats Update: We’re Getting CLOSE!

Annapurna Boardgame
2 days ago
2 min read

Hello everyone! It’s been a few months since my last update and I’m happy to report that Herding Cats has been coming along well! We have a new board, new layout, and I’m confident that we are close to finalizing the rules.

As you can see we’ve added a border of water around the edge. This gives cats ZOOMIES at the end of each turn and makes them run to the center, like the trees used to in an older version. Yes, making a cat noise is still required. REQUIRED.

New Magnet Mechanics

The little black orbs are “dogs”. They will eventually have actual models, these I had to make at home so they are a bit… spherical. They repel everything and stay in place. The tuna cans can repel OR attract, and the cat and cat ladies repel and move.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/161558_fa3975dbcae349d4bdefafd8af27144d/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Dogs are held in place by metal nuts under the board currently, the final version will have a different mechanism.

All the tuna cans and ‘dogs’ are acrylics that I make at home. It’s a proccess that takes 3-4 days that incluldes making molds, pouring acrylic, inserting magnets, pouring more acrylic.. panicking when I pour too much acrylic. It’s a whole thing, and I’m very proud of my tiny tuna cans and round doggos even if they won’t be in the final game.

CARDS

If you haven’t seen the new cards, here they are! Easy to understand, cute cats, amazing art, gradient-y. Anyway, next iterrations will have key rules on the character cards.

MORE PLAYTESTING

A lot of playtests from the last two months had to be missed due to MULTIPLE SNOWSTORMS in Jersey. Both my little kitties and I are SICK of snow so being able to go to a playtest last night was awesome. I yet again forgot to take photos though because I was having too much fun. So here’s a video of Athena on a “walk”. She was also happy to be outside.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/161558_a44c2402097e49f0a1443510516b9bd5/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Next week I will be at UnPub to do what will hopefully be one of the final playtests. There will be many other professional game designers there, so if anyone will find glaring errors that have somehow been missed, it’s them. Four days of playtesting, fun, and CATS!

Stay tuned the results and check out our events page to see where we will be next!